Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday June 27, 2007 @07:48AM
from the now-that-paris-is-out dept.

JLester writes "Wired Magazine has an interview this month with Hans Reiser (of the ReiserFS journaling file system for Linux) from prison. It contains more details about the murder case against him. Some of the questions still go unanswered though."

In Reiser's case, a critical piece of data -- the location of Nina Reiser -- has gone missing.

Ugh. OK, this is a crowd that makes rough jokes, etc. In this case I am having a bit of a problem taking it. I've met Hans and have spoken with Nina on the phone. Oh shit, I found that interview very unsettling and while reading it in the audience at a conference in Norway I got upset enough by page three that I did not continue it for fear of getting too visibly upset in front of the audience.

You are quite possibly the only person on Slashdot (Or at least, the only person who posts under their real name) who has a personal connection to Hans & Nina Reiser. You shouldn't be too surprised that the vast majority of posters arn't going to take it as seriously.

You are quite possibly the only person on Slashdot (Or at least, the only person who posts under their real name) who has a personal connection to Hans & Nina Reiser. You shouldn't be too surprised that the vast majority of posters arn't going to take it as seriously.

Try this idea on for size: suppose that Hans Reiser is an odd, cantankerous computer programmer, who really didn't kill his wife, and is now rotting in jail largely because he's an odd, cantankerous fellow.

Well, the original quote itself was from the article. Which is one of the... oddest articles I've read from Wired. When you give something like that to/. as source material you're going to get some wildly inappropriate reactions.

For an article which is supposed to show the more "personal" side of things, the main thing I'm taking away from this is that the author is seriously fucked up. It's like the worst tabloid journalism combined with a Dvorak column. It certainly didn't do much to help Hans...

If you look at Joshua Davis' past articles on Hans (here [wired.com] and here [wired.com], you'll see that he has been quite sympathetic to Hans' plight. Yet this particular article is much more ambivalent. I suspect the explanation for why this most recent story seems a bit confusing, and the author some what ambivalent, is that his sympathies and opinions about Hans' guilt or innocent have shifted over time.

I was contacted by the author in late March to give background information on the technical facts in the article, and he has never claimed that he was a technical person or in possession of a geek badge. My input into the story was solely on things like "what is a b-tree", and to eliminate the really embarrassing technical errors and misconceptions that the author might have had. At one point I believe the Joshua Davies wanted to put a spin on the "geek tragedy" that Reiser4 was this ground-breaking filesystem with great ideas that was languishing because its author/architect was languishing in fail. So I was given entire paragraphs of technical detail where I had to say, "no that's wrong," and "no, not quite", etc., etc. As far as whether or not Reiser4 was great, ground-breaking filesystem, I tried very hard to give both sides of the story --- that some people would say it was great, and other people would say that Hans had a tendency to fudge benchmarks ---- and I made it very clear that some people might consider that my views were biased, due to my past and continuing work on the ext2/3/4 filesystem, and that the author should definitely contact other people and get their opinions. So I disclosed all, which in my opinion was the only responsible thing to do, and I tried to be very, very careful about labelling what was fact and what was opinion.

(I'm of the opinion that if you want better technical understanding by journalists, if someone approaches you requesting background information and promises that you won't be quoted, you should spend time educating them about technical details, since that's the only way we can improve technical accuracy in reporting. Another interesting thing which I learned is that while Wired rights about subjects at are of interests to geeks, they do not assume that their articles will be written by geeks and they pitch their articles to be understandable by the general public; also, that most of their writers are not geeks themselves. All not surprising if you think about it a little, and especially if you reflect that the intersection of strong technical clue and strong writing skills is pretty rare.)

In the end, the story was about as good as you might expect. The facts of the story are confusing, as there were and there are no clear heroes and several suspicions and deeply flawed human beings that could possibly be villains but for which we can't really say for sure. There are no obvious technical errors in the story, except for one that I noticed, where the word registry is misused and should have been replaced with "data structure" instead: "It contains a single registry -- known as a balanced tree -- to organize every piece of data in the operating system". A lot of the details about reiserfs and reiser4 was ultimately cut out, as being not very relevant to the storyline that Joshua ultimately chose to tell.

I have to say that having spent several hours talking to Joshua Davies, and talking to his editor who spent a lot of time doing fact checking on the technical details and background, that both he and his editor have my respect seekers of truth. He went into this with point of view that I believe was very, very sympathetic to Hans, and it would have been very easy to turn this into a stock storybook story with the police cast as the cardboard, clueless villians, and Hans the hero languishing in jail, the victim of said clueless Keystone Kops. But he didn't do that. He

It's going to happen every time someone dies, is killed or whatnot. It will happen when you die, when RMS dies, when Linus dies and when any celebrity dies. It might be hard to take for those who knew the person, but the vast majority of the world didn't and shouldn't be expected to act as if they had.

"Respect" != "being quiet." People joke about tragedies all the time--from the famine in Ethiopia to the Challenger disaster to the 9/11 attacks. It's what people do. Jay Leno's career got a huge boost by making jokes about O.J. (for a long time, Letterman didn't)--and we had a body in that case! I'm sure every slashdotter--even the ones posting the most tasteless jokes imaginable--respect Hans, the work he's done, and the contributions he's made.

Everyone is offended by something. Does that mean that no one should ever joke about anything? As it happens, this is one of the few places where a joke about this would be understood--can you imagine Leno going on the air with a filesystem joke?

If you choked to death eating an orange, and someone found a months-old shopping list in your office containing the item "oranges," would that be ironic? No. It would be completely unremarkable.It is not surprising that filesystem code would contain tree terminology such as "parent," "child," and "sibling," and lifecycle terminology such as "death." In fact, it's predictable. That's how the damn lazy reporter found those code snippets in the first place. He knew they were there; anyone who knows a damn

so what's your POV? I don't mean who did what, but what kind of people they are?

For several years before this happened, Hans built a record of being really abusive of the Linux kernel developers on public mailing lists. I thought upon occassion of asking him "Do you know you are completely screwing up all of your business hopes for nothing?", but what I read from him also put me off enough that I just stayed away from him.

Nina Reiser doesn't seem to be around to defend her reputation. I won't make a judgement about her because of that. I have managed to get almost to age 50 without ever having any friends or even frequent associates like the two other people described in the article. And I consider that I've been really lucky that way.

A wrestler and his family died recently, allegedly at the wrestler's hands.

And that did not get on Slashdot, because it wasn't anyone we know. Reiser is interesting to Slashdot readers because he was connected with the kernel developers, and some of us here identify ourselve as being connected with that community.

Tragedies don't exist in space. They exist in minds. A tragedy is a tragedy become of the perspective we have on a series of events and its protagonists. The pain of the protagonists is real, but our framing of that pain - as tragic, as just, as comic, as absurd, as pathetic, as brute fact - is another story. This is true for the invasion of Iraq, the holocaust, the invasion of Lebanon, the fall of the USSR, the colonization of the Americas (talk about wildly divergent framing), for someone's unemployment, for infidelity (one person's betrayal is another person's self-discovery), and so on.

The question is, given these divergent framings, how do we deal with each other in a space of discourse? Some of the responses to that problem are now characterized as an excess of consideration, "political correctness." Which I think is a shame, because it leads to the collapse of the possibility of respect outside of very closed communities. At the same time, calls for "respect" are also power plays: demanding that we respect the sacrifices of (our) soldiers is a way of muting protest and deflecting the critique of their behavior. Likewise, antiwar activists can also be selective - and just as maudlin - in their selection of the space of the tragic.

OTOH, (damn your hide...) this is one of the few times when I really wish they had a special occasion mod limit of "6". Damned near bit my tongue in half in trying not to wake up my part of the cube farm this morning.

I've listened to Hans over the years in lkml. He's an odd one. He might be a genius, it's possible, if he played well with others he'd almost certainly be a community hero. It's also possible he has some severe emotional or mental problems, maybe mild autism, I'm no psychiatrist but I'd say that this is more than possible and probably likely. He also has this incredible quality to completely ignore what someone says and just focus on what he wants. It's like he's incapable of comprehending English (or any human to human language) when he's in this sort of fit. That's why rfs4 isn't in the kernel, all he had to do was play nice with others and answer their concerns, it'd be done by now if he did but every question was always answered with some fear or something completely unrelated. You can ask him a question and he hears something else, he'll respond but it's like he didn't see or hear your question. Then at other times he's remarkably lucid.

Now this is crappy journalism. It sounds like Hans to me though. This doesn't bode well for his case. He's going to prison when this is done. His lawyers should have kept him from saying anything. He's looking down the barrel of a long stay in prison, everything looks like he did it and was prepared to flee. An article on a popular magazine with "if( node->parent == NULL) printk("parent not found")" isn't what you want.

Really? Her boyfriend (the guy she cheated on him with) confessed to killing 8 people and might have killed 9, but he's not really sure. I'm not kidding, either. That's a little "odd" too isn't it? Usually people keep count of the murders they commit, for the sake of easy confessions at least..

There's also the 3 guys that were accused, when they were teenagers, of killing three eight year-old boys, and were placed in jail (one on death row). The evidence is absolute crap, and the "investigation" into the murders was bumbled and shoddy. The key evidence against the "leader" was that he wore black a lot and liked to read about Wicca and other "satanic" and "demonic" things... like heavy metal music. Oh no!

HBO has played two documentaries on this case (Paradise Lost and Paradise Lost 2) and they are enraging. Granted you're seeing edited information, but if you can, I'd really recommned seeing these two DVDs. Amazon is selling them DVD 1 [amazon.com] and DVD 2 [amazon.com]

There's also a web site dedicate to the cause of helping the guys (Known as The West Memphis Three) get a fair trial and have real evidence shown (which there doesn't seem to be any of). Visit wm3.org [wm3.org] for details.

I've been fascinated with this case for 10+ years and check out the wm3 site a few times a year to see what's new with the case. It's an absolute tragedy that three children were killed, and it's another tragedy that three other lives (teenagers) were destroyed as well if in fact they are innocent, as it would seem they may be.

Yeah but you can see why people get the wrong idea about Hanshttp://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07/ff_hansreiser?currentPage=5 [wired.com] Reiser delves into this "culture of manhood" in a 32-page filing he submits to the court after Nina accuses him of hurting her. In it, he explains the difference between appropriate and inappropriate violence. Grand Theft Auto, for instance, demonstrates inappropriate violence because players can get away with killing innocent people. "Many other computer games heavily

Just one question... define a "wrong person". To me that's rapists, child molestors, dolly parton and my prime minister... to someone with a lot more sanity than myself, I'm sure dolly isn't in that list...

If you ever serve jury duty. That way they can dismiss you and choose jurors who can do the job correctly.

Violence against your wife is inappropriate and illegal (unless of course it's to protect yourself from her). If it was self-defense or didn't happen or was an accident then you'd expect someone to start out saying that. A rant about inappropriate and appropriate violence in this context is only going to end in him trying to explain that it was somehow appropriate to hit his wife outside of self-defense, which means he's guilty and should go to jail.

Did you read the article? First the CRX goes missing for a long time. Then...

On September 13, the Oakland police get a search warrant to scour the Reiser household. They find a drop of blood on a support post in the entry. Oakland's crime lab identifies the sample as a mix of Nina's and Reiser's, though it can't determine how old the blood is. Five days later, the police follow Reiser to the CRX, which is parked on a quiet street in nearby Berkeley. He moves it to a secluded, wooded area of Oakland and d

Nina is not dead. Either she's hiding, or she's lost somewhere, or possibly has lost her memory. I presume she loves her kids to much to put them through this ordeal, so I consider this hypothesis unlikely.

Well, Nina is a Russian mail-order bride. According to the article, Nina and Hans conceived a child their first night together. Really roped Hans in pretty quick, no?

The kids are currently known to be in Russia, and the Russian mom is conveniently nowhere to be found.

My theory is this:
Nina went back to russia, and is now living there. The fact that the kids are in russia, and were supposed to return weeks ago, but haven't, makes me think that maybe they were reunited with their mother there.
Just a thought.

problem here is that my gf was one of her best friends. neither she, nor any of her other friends, have heard from her. I (well, really my gf, who knew her) don't think that was in character from this woman. If she was back in russia, presumably her friends would know.

Perhaps. But putting it together like this, it fits nicely with the back-to-Russia story: A) she's a mail-order bride and these services are known to often be scams, B) she almost immediately engaged in embezzlement the moment she had access to large sums of money, C) she's disappeared and there's no body, and finally, as you said, D) her kids were sent to her mother in Russia, and now are mysteriously "terrified" at coming back to the US.

Reiser is worried that Sturgeon is trying to teach Rory and Niorline that pain can be fun and is furious when Sturgeon gives them what Reiser refers to in a sworn court filing as "gender confused alternative sexuality dolls."

In England (where I expect you sourced gaol from), jails == prisons; the same facilities are used for both unconvicted inmates "on remand" and those who have been duly convicted and are serving out their sentences.

In America, jails (except for Texas, which has "state jails" for sentences up to 2 years, and the federal system, which often houses in BOP "prison" facilities pre-trial) are used for pre-trial detention and for sentences up to a year. Prisons are much larger facilities exclusively for sentenced inmates serving a year or more.

The story about Hans Reiser gets weirder every time I read about it. It's like you're reading some surrealistic novel, or maybe a plot by Grisham.

For one, there is the question whether he is being framed (by a former friend, russian mafia,... ?)Also there is the problem of (suspected) murder, but no body has been found. So, all evidence will be circumstantial and therefore open to lots of discussion/interpretation. "The brothers Karamazov" by Dostojevski has some very nice examples of how wide apart such interpretations can be (without the reader being able to tell which interpretation is true). Probably someone could write an interesting novel based on this story as well. It's getting so weird, you just can't make such stuff up.

It could become an interesting case to follow, so I'm hoping groklaw might pay some attention to it (if such hearings are even public - I don't have much clue about the US judicial system, but it seems unlikely).

Agreed, by the time I was done reading this, I couldn't decide if it was real or not. Kudos to the author for piecing together a lot of information in a compelling format. I especially enjoyed the code fragments related to the story - rather spooky.

Yeah, this was the first I'd read that his best friend has admitted to committing several murders in the past, and had been having an affair with his wife too. This has turned from a geek-commits-murder into a *really* crazy love triangle story.

Sort of complicates the case for the prosecution. Though the missing passenger seat and condition of Reiser's car and his refusal to explain it certainly makes him sound guilty to a juror (or anyone else).

After reading this article I did understand a bit better how a man could be driven to do something... drastic. If your wife started doing drugs with and fucking your tattoed, bi-sexual, BDSM-obsessed best friend, and then dumped you for him, and was exposing your children to that (at least until the judge forced her not to), well, I could see that pushing a guy who wasn't fully mentally grounded in the first place over the edge.

Another angle: The friend, through the wife, may have started running errands for the Russian mafia. (Yes Virginia, there really is a strong, nasty Russian mob presence in parts of the US today.) The kids now in Russia, HR fears for their lives if he implicates his friend.

The involvement of the Russian mafia must be considered. The odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the Russian mail order bride people being involved in organized crime. Hans may fear for his own life as well as the lives of his kids.

Each node is either brought into memory as a result of tree traversal, or created afresh, creation of the root being a special case of the latter. In either case it's inserted into sibling list. This will typically require some ancillary tree traversing, but ultimately both sibling pointers will exist and JNODE_LEFT_CONNECTED and JNODE_RIGHT_CONNECTED will be true in zjnode.state.

3. His youth.

If znode is bound to already existing node in a tree, its content is read from the disk by call to zload(). At that moment, JNODE_LOADED bit is set in zjnode.state and zdata() function starts to return non null for this znode. zload() further calls zparse() that determines which node layout this node is rendered in, and sets ->nplug on success.

If znode is for new node just created, memory for it is allocated and zinit_new() function is called to initialise data, according to selected node layout.

4. His maturity.

After this point, znode lingers in memory for some time. Threads can acquire references to znode either by blocknr through call to zget(), or by following a pointer to unallocated znode from internal item. Each time reference to znode is obtained, x_count is increased. Thread can read/write lock znode. Znode data can be loaded through calls to zload(), d_count will be increased appropriately. If all references to znode are released (x_count drops to 0), znode is not recycled immediately. Rather, it is still cached in the hash table in the hope that it will be accessed shortly.

There are two ways in which znode existence can be terminated:

. sudden death: node bound to this znode is removed from the tree
. overpopulation: znode is purged out of memory due to memory pressure

5. His death.

Death is complex process.

When we irrevocably commit ourselves to decision to remove node from the tree, JNODE_HEARD_BANSHEE bit is set in zjnode.state of corresponding znode. This is done either in ->kill_hook() of internal item or in kill_root() function when tree root is removed.

At this moment znode still has:

. locks held on it, necessary write ones
. references to it
. disk block assigned to it
. data loaded from the disk
. pending requests for lock

But once JNODE_HEARD_BANSHEE bit set, last call to unlock_znode() does node deletion. Node deletion includes two phases. First all ways to get references to that znode (sibling and parent links and hash lookup using block number stored in parent node) should be deleted -- it is done through sibling_list_remove(), also we assume that nobody uses down link from parent node due to its nonexistence or proper parent node locking and nobody uses parent pointers from children due to absence of them. Second we invalidate all pending lock requests which still are on znode's lock request queue, this is done by invalidate_lock(). Another JNODE_IS_DYING znode status bit is used to invalidate pending lock requests. Once it set all requesters are forced to return -EINVAL from longterm_lock_znode(). F

From what I've read, he doesn't come off as very innocent. I read the article in the paper magazine last weekend, and he just seems like a really weird guy. Despite the fact that they picked this interviewer because they thought he would understand Reiser, because he is a misunderstood geek, he still came off as quite a weird guy. The whole part about playing battlefield vietnam with his 6 year old so he could "become a man" was just kind of weird, and really made me question his values. Not that I'm against kids playing violent games, but his whole reasoning behind it was just kind of creepy.

There is nothing wrong. It is just some person (GP) projecting his own belief of how to raise a kid on Hans Reiser and calling him weird for not qualifying it. It is quite probable that Hans did wanted to raise his kid as "a Man", after all, how many of us have not thought of raising our kids "unlike" us? Add with this the affinity his wife had with "Manly" people (his other boy friend is in hard code BDSM), it is quite understandable.Ofcourse his being weird does not shed even a bit of light on how he coul

There's a scanner which can monitor brain activity realtime, depending on which areas light up, police can tell if you're lying or not. They don't even have to ask any questions, simply present evidence to you and watch what your brain does.

As a geek who may at some point become falsely accused, how much trust would you really put in a piece of flashy tech like that? Unless the device was completely open-source and peer reviewable, and every last scientific principle behind the neural activity what the machine reads were completely understood (they aren't by a long shot,) I wouldn't want that thing anywhere near me in a life-or-death court case deciding my future.

There are two problems with machine-assisted lie detection: People who train to control their responses on a polygraph, and people who believe what they say, even though it isn't true. The brain activity monitoring method only attacks the first problem, not the second.

Part of this is a philosophical problem: Someone with a false grip on reality (to a greater or lesser extent, all of us have some false perceptions or memories) may make a factual statement that is not consistent with objective reality, but if that person *believes* in the truth of the statement, should we even consider them to be lying? I think that the common definition of lying implies intent--you have to know that what you're saying is false. Otherwise, you're merely wrong or delusional.

It doesn't take a complete nutter to believe in false things, either. Most people believe they are more attractive, more competent, and smarter than the rest of us would rate them. A fair number of people have body image or confidence issues that cause them to vastly underestimate their charms. Sometimes, people just ignore the unpleasant realities of life by not thinking about them. Even better examples come up in looking at objective assessments of eyewitness identification in criminal cases--people can fool themselves into believing all sorts of things.

I mean, just look at the two different stories that Reiser's son told regarding the last argument between his mother and father: He had to have been making false statements in one of the two interviews, since they contain mutually contradictory statements of fact. But did he believe in the truth of what he said at the time? If you don't think this is possible, try to imagine the terrific psychological pressures on the boy's head over the last few years.

Hence the problem with using brain activity as an indicator of truth: It can only tell you about the subjective truth of a person's statements, not the objective truth. There's a great potential for difference between the two.

I find it really interesting if you look at the Russian mafia angle. Maybe Nina's in Russia?? I think that is where she really is considering that she had obtained Russian citizenship for both of her children. While Reiser is, shall we say, unique, he does not sound much different then alot of geeks. I hope something happens and he's freed. With the Children in Russia, there may never be a straight answer to what happened to Nina.

First of all, what is it with the weird style this "interview" is written in? Joshua Davis should go off and write private investigator novels, instead of doing journalism on criminal cases. It was difficult to discern, where the claims of Reiser, Sturgeon or the DA end and where Davis' own storytelling starts.

Hans Reiser has to be at least paranoid, which he apparently inherited from his father:

"Reiser calls his dad and explains that unmarked cars and maybe an airplane are tracking him. In Ramon's opinion, it's an operation beyond the scope of local police. It sounds like the Russian mafia, Ramon says, or maybe the Russian spy agency, the FSB."

Why would the FSB be interested in him? Don't they know that ReiserFS is open source?

Another nugget is his insistence on playing violent video games with his six year old son. He defended this practise in a "32-page filing" on the "culture of manhood" during his divorce trial. That alone has nutjob written all over it.

He believes mental health professionals scorn people who "teach the culture of manhood to little boys, with all of its inherent opposition to wallowing in wimpiness."

Well, I don't see much of manhood in Hans Reiser's behaviour. He comes of as whiny and paranoid, accusing everybody but himself for his mistakes. And he appears even to be proud of conceiving a child in the first night with his mail order bride. That's both pathetic and idiotic!

And don't even get me started on this Sturgeon guy. It seems like lunatics come in packs. I for one wouldn't take Hans Reisers advice on anything but file systems serious.

And the wife doesn't sound like quite as much of a sweet, innocent victim anymore either. She started cheating on nutjob number 1 with even bigger nutjob number 2, the admitted murderer with bizarre sexual tastes, and exposed her children to that crap until a judge ordered her not to.

This is an admittedly fascinating story for some reason. But when you remember that it's all real, you can't help but shed a few tears for these kids, who are going to grow up with no mother, with a twisted father who probably killed their mother and will be rotting in jail for years to come, with a paranoid, delusional grandfather and kook for a grandmother in the US.

Maybe they're better off being in Russia after all. You come away from that story sort of despairing of their chances for growing up to be reasonably mentally healthy adults.

Read the whole article. It gets really creepy and bizzarre... like when they start talking about brainwashing the kid and so on. The wife sounds really creepy.. but who knows, it was quite one-sided. Except for the end, interestingly enough.

While he launches into the intricacies of database science, I'm thinking, "Where is the front passenger seat of your car?" He has never explained this. It seems a fundamental hole in his defense. But he won't stop talking. When I try to interrupt, he insists I let him finish. It's as if the file system holds all the answers.

So I take the hint, and that night, in my office, I start scouring the 80,496 lines of the Reiser4 source code. Eventually I stumble across a passage that starts at line 78,077. It's not part of the program itself -- it's an annotation, a piece of non-executable text in plain English. It's there for the benefit of someone who has chosen to read this far into the code. The passage explains how memory structures are born, grow, and eventually die. It concludes: "Death is a complex process."

Crazy... does anyone know what the text of the passage is? I searched for "Death is a complex process" on Google code search, Koders, and Codase; got nothing...

diff -puN/dev/null fs/reiser4/znode.c---/dev/null Thu Apr 11 07:25:15 2002+++ 25-akpm/fs/reiser4/znode.c Wed Mar 30 14:55:08 2005@@ -0,0 +1,1141 @@/* Copyright 2001, 2002, 2003 by Hans Reiser, licensing governed by
* reiser4/README *//* Znode manipulation functions. *//* Znode is the in-memory header for a tree node. It is stored
separately from the node itself so that it does not get written to
disk. In this respect znode is like buffer head or page head. We
also use znodes for additional reiser4 specific purposes:

. they are organized into tree structure which is a part of whole
reiser4 tree.
. they are used to implement node grained locking
. they are used to keep additional state associated with a
node
. they contain links to lists used by the transaction manager

Znode is attached to some variable "block number" which is instance of
fs/reiser4/tree.h:reiser4_block_nr type. Znode can exist without
appropriate node being actually loaded in memory. Existence of znode itself
is regulated by reference count (->x_count) in it. Each time thread
acquires reference to znode through call to zget(), ->x_count is
incremented and decremented on call to zput(). Data (content of node) are
brought in memory through call to zload(), which also increments ->d_count
reference counter. zload can block waiting on IO. Call to zrelse()
decreases this counter. Also, ->c_count keeps track of number of child
znodes and prevents parent znode from being recycled until all of its
children are. ->c_count is decremented whenever child goes out of existence
(being actually recycled in zdestroy()) which can be some time after last
reference to this child dies if we support some form of LRU cache for
znodes.

*//* EVERY ZNODE'S STORY

1. His infancy.

Once upon a time, the znode was born deep inside of zget() by call to
zalloc(). At the return from zget() znode had:

Each node is either brought into memory as a result of tree traversal, or
created afresh, creation of the root being a special case of the latter. In
either case it's inserted into sibling list. This will typically require
some ancillary tree traversing, but ultimately both sibling pointers will
exist and JNODE_LEFT_CONNECTED and JNODE_RIGHT_CONNECTED will be true in
zjnode.state.

There is nothing strange about the terminology Hans used. Speaking of data structures or objects as 'live' entities with a 'life cycle' is normal in computer science. Objects are created ('born'), they live and then they are eventually destroyed. That last part is sometimes referred to as getting 'killed', such as by receiving a 'kill signal'. Because some objects are older than others, terms such as 'generations of objects' are also used.

Well, sort of. The passage does say "memory structures" so it isn't taking it totally out of context per se. But applying it to imply that Reiser was thinking about death (or whatever the author is implying here) is a bit odd and out of context, especially since he concluded the entire 5 page article with this random quote which implies he is guilty.

I'm quite confused because the author seemed to be portraying Reiser as innocent up until that point.

Interesting that they found this passage in the program too. Death is mentioned an awful lot in computer science really. We speak of "killing" processes and the like.

You know (or at least think) that after this, there's never going to be anyone else. He had to turn to a Russian bride already. I bet his social skills aren't even that great. Its easy to envision living alone forever after that, while your friend and your ex-wife run off together.

If you want to know why he looks/talks crazy..that's why. Doesn't justify murder, but might give some insight into why he looks shitty.

Hmm.. It's pretty suspicious that Han's kids are still in Russia with his former mother-in-law.I think she's alive and well in Russia. If she was killed her body or parts of would have turnedup by now. And if she is alive, maybe this was her parents way of getting her out of the US? Shewas a bright woman who started to take a pretty dark path. You could see all the classic signs here.Hans was too rapped up into namesys. He married a hottie wife who noticed that she was getting a lotof attention elsewhere. I think once Nina started messing around with other stuff her parents gother out of the country. The fact that the passenger seat is missing from the CRX and the fact that carhad been washed out, casts some doubt on the belief that Hans is innocent here. He needs to come cleanwith information about that.

I think the defense needs to monitor Nina's Mom and Hans' kids in Russia to see if Nina is there.

Anytime you can't explain things like missing vehicles and scrubbed interiors, you got problems. I was expecting a police conspiracy after reading the comments, but there are a lot of arrows pointing at him. And, what's with his "friend" Sturgeon? It's almost as if he doesn't get that banging your buddy's wife might cause some strain on your relationship!

No sympathy for the guy, though. A hot Russian mail order bride doctor and you don't suspect the package might be a little too good to be true?

First of all, do you believe everything that is written by a sensationalist magazine like Wired? While they have been fairly neutral about the whole affair, they do tend to write their pieces with a bit of a flair, just as you have pointed out. And being a bit sensationalist. By going on and on about how she may be a mail order bride or not is besides the point.

I know Hans in a very deep and personal way, so this isn't based on the story but rather from personal experience and first hand knowledge of both working with Hans and spending huge amounts of time with his father (who I actually know much better, to be honest). Hans' father, Ramon, was throughally against the marriage from the get go and even said so before the nuptials. He warned that there was nothing good that would come from the marriage and suggested that Hans leave before it ever got started. It is too bad that Hans didn't listen to this bit of parental advise.

Your quote here did trigger some thought I had, however, about how Nina really had one huge goal in mind when she met Hans: To get American citizenship. And she decided to do that on her back . Seriously, with her medical training and a strong desire to get the big prize, it seems very reasonable that she deliberately timed the nuptials and her first night with Hans at her peak fertility so she could become pregnant.

The photos of Hans that have been sent around the internet since his arrest don't do him justice. He is the ultimate geek's geek, as much as you would expect if you would be involved with designing core elements of the Linux kernel. And he knows how to put on a show but also avoids conformity, particularly when it comes to dressing the part of being a hardcore geek.

As far as if he really did the murder or not, I don't really know. It certainly isn't as easy of a case to prove as OJ Simpson's case, and it appears as though Hans did some real stupid things right after the disappearance of Nina. That he did piss off some Russian businessmen while running his team in Moscow is certain as well, and Nina didn't help out in smoothing things over... in fact tended to add to the problems. His "friend" also was involved in some financial manipulations that actually got far worse than is publicized.

The truly unfortunate part right now is that Hans will never get to see his kids again... or his parents be able to see their grandchildren. That last part is particularly galling because although they are recognized as native-born Americans by the U.S. Government, Russia is claiming Russian citizenship for the two kids and refusing to return them to America. Regardless of who did what, these two kids are the ultimate victims of being denied the ability to see either parent, extended family, or even being able to grow up in the land of their birth. And the State of California is directly to blame on this point, where allowing the kids to leave the USA was even against state law and established child custody guidelines... not to mention that the oldest child is a material witness on behalf of the defense. His leaving the USA could perhaps even be considered tampering with the evidence, and certainly by itself is grounds for an appeal of any guilty verdict.

As for the question about the car.... it seems weird and will to a jury, but what did he do "wrong"? There is nothing he did there that was illegal, and nothing found in or on the car can reasonably be used to demonstrate guilt other than through a very loose "circumstantial evidence". Not even the blood found supposedly in the carpet of the car in trace amounts that seems to match Nina's DNA. That just means she was in the car sometime in the past, and that point is not in dispute. There are photos of her next to the car.

While he launches into the intricacies of database science, I'm thinking, "Where is the front passenger seat of your car?" He has never explained this. It seems a fundamental hole in his defense. But he won't stop talking. When I try to interrupt, he insists I let him finish. It's as if the file system holds all the answers.

So I take the hint, and that night, in my office, I start scouring the 80,496 lines of the Reiser4 source code. Eventually I stumble across a passage that starts at line 78,077. It's not part of the program itself it's an annotation, a piece of non-executable text in plain English. It's there for the benefit of someone who has chosen to read this far into the code. The passage explains how memory structures are born, grow, and eventually die. It concludes: "Death is a complex process."

So I guess this is a confession now? I'm sorry but that's just deceiving and wrong. He calls a patch against the kernel tree a "program" and all the pluses he didn't remove before the code reaffirm this suspicion that he doesn't even know what proper code looks like. He makes it sound as if this comment describing how a specific file structure of the file system works as some sort of "secret confession" hidden there for the unscrupulous researcher. Joshua Davis, please turn in your geek badge!

With someone that calls himself a geek to come with such a preposterous conclusion leaves me little room for hope that any sort of truth of this case from either side will come out or that any real justice will be done. It speaks volumes of the "blindness of justice" and how our prisons end up being jammed with people placed on death row with DNA evidence later exonerating them and having no recourse to repair their life or credibility. So truly, Death really is a Complex Process.

Here is the actual passage he was talking about:

+/* EVERY ZNODE'S STORY++ 1. His infancy.++ Once upon a time, the znode was born deep inside of zget() by call to+ zalloc(). At the return from zget() znode had:++ . reference counter (x_count) of 1+ . assigned block number, marked as used in bitmap+ . pointer to parent znode. Root znode parent pointer points+ to its father: "fake" znode. This, in turn, has NULL parent pointer.+ . hash table linkage+ . no data loaded from disk+ . no node plugin+ . no sibling linkage++ 2. His childhood++ Each node is either brought into memory as a result of tree traversal, or+ created afresh, creation of the root being a special case of the latter. In+ either case it's inserted into sibling list. This will typically require+ some ancillary tree traversing, but ultimately both sibling pointers will+ exist and JNODE_LEFT_CONNECTED and JNODE_RIGHT_CONNECTED will be true in+ zjnode.state.++ 3. His youth.++ If znode is bound to already existing node in a tree, its content is read+ from the disk by call to zload(). At that moment, JNODE_LOADED bit is set+ in zjnode.state and zdata() function starts to return non null for this+ znode. zload() further calls zparse() that determines which node layout+ this node is rendered in, and sets ->nplug on success.++ If znode is for new node just created, memory for it is allocated and+ zinit_new() function is called to initialise data, according to selected+ node layout.++ 4. His maturity.++ After this point, znode lingers in memory for some time. Threads can+ acquire references to znode either by blocknr through call to zget(), or by+ following a pointer to unallocated znode from internal item. Each time+ reference to znode is obtained, x_count is increased. Thread can read/write+ lock znode. Znode data can be loaded through calls to zload(), d_count will+ be increased appropriately. If all references to znode are released+ (x_count drops to 0), znode is n

I must say, the article describes some very damning evidence:
"Police search the CRX and find that the front passenger seat has recently been removed. The floor is soaked, as if it had been washed. There are heavy-duty garbage bags, cloth towels, masking tape, and two books: Masterpieces of Murder and Homicide. Police also find another drop of blood and match it to Nina."
This is after the police have (surreptitiously) followed Hans to the car and observed him moving it to a different location. What other explanation could there be for this than that Hans did indeed murder Nina, especially since (as far as I can tell from the article) Hans has offered no other explanation for the state of the car?
Some of the rest of his interview sounds pretty creepy and paranoid too. For example, Hans says: "Male geeks, such as myself, are one of America's most hated cultural minorities," he writes. "Unlike racial hatred, it is considered socially acceptable to indulge in such hatred." This is obviously completely ridiculous. He then proceeds to use this as an excuse for a lot of strange behavior, such as wanting to "teach the culture of manhood to little boys, with all of its inherent opposition to wallowing in wimpiness" (talking about playing hours and hours of Battlefield Vietnam with his six year old son).
None of that is evidence of murder of course, but it does make Hans seem unstable and paranoid and his explanations suspect. All in all it seems likely to me that Hans did indeed murder Nina. Of course in theory I suppose it's possible that he's the victim of some extremely elaborate setup (which I fully expect many people who watch too much CSI to claim), but in reality I think that's an very unlikely option.
Having said that, this is just what I currently personally believe. If I was a juror I would vote "not guilty" on this evidence. I'm a big believer in "proven beyond all reasonable doubt." As long as there isn't even any evidence that Nina is actually dead, let alone hard evidence that Hans did it, I would have give him the benefit of the doubt, even though personally I find it more likely that he did it than not. To let off a murderer would be very bad, but in my opinion it would be much worse to wrongly convict an innocent man.

If I was a juror I would vote "not guilty" on this evidence. I'm a big believer in "proven beyond all reasonable doubt."

Quite, but I have serious problems trusting a selection of my "peers" to be quite so impartial and clear thinking. Especially when a massive proportion of them repeatedly demonstrate their poor reasoning skills and/or ethics with beliefs like the creator of the universe has a personal relationship with them, crystals have healing energy, homosexuals are evil, atheists are worse, Bush is awesome, American Idol is pretty good, and the Iraq war is about the 9/11 terrorists.

If I was a juror I would vote "not guilty" on this evidence. I'm a big believer in "proven beyond all reasonable doubt."

Quite, but I have serious problems trusting a selection of my "peers" to be quite so impartial and clear thinking.

Actually I agree. By "if I was a juror" it didn't mean to imply that I approve of the jury system... I am actually strongly against it. In my own country professional (as opposed to elected or appointed) judges determine guilt and punishment, and while we have our share of miscarriages of justice on the whole I think it's a much better system.

I think you have one of the most reasonable takes on the article here on Slashdot. But I have some comments.

"Male geeks, such as myself, are one of America's most hated cultural minorities," he writes. "Unlike racial hatred, it is considered socially acceptable to indulge in such hatred." This is obviously completely ridiculous.

Yes, it is, as stated, a totally wrong opinion, I agree (anyone who thinks that personal_opposition_to_racism = lack_of_racism is sadly a fool). But there is some validity to the "it

I would like to add here that:1) Hans doesn't appear to have a history of violence. Going from no violence to murder, without a shred of real evidence beyond the circumstantial appears too good to be true. He would have had to screw something up. Unlike his friend who might I add is an accomplished assassin.

2) He seems very gullible to me, and wasn't taking the advice of people who knew him.(Father calls him up to tell him the money is disappearing and he thinks the chix is soaking him.)

Nonsense. It shows that the interviewer cared about the guy's work and accomplishments, not just his alleged crimes. For someone who has been sitting in prison, going to court hearings and meetings with lawyers and talking about nothing else, it was probably nice to talk filesystems for a change. I imagine the interviewer was the first person he'd seen in months who knew what a filesystem even was.

Hint: there's this concept we have called 'innocent until proven guilty'.

It's also one of those concepts which looks great on paper, but is sadly shown as so much idealistic BS in the real world.

From everything I've read, I'm inclined to believe that Reiser is probably guilty, but if the above concept had really been applied in this case, the police would not have arrested him before they produced a positively identified body.

When they served the search warrant on him he was carrying about 9 grand in cash and his passport. You don't think he may be a flight risk?

There could be good reasons for having these things on him, other than flight risk. If he was expecting arrest, having the $9k in cash on him would keep that money locked away as "personal effects" until his release. That would be a place, I suspect, legally protected in some ways that a bank might not protect him -- such as protection from creditors. (and he did have

You should have finished the story, but I'll spoil it for you. He hid the car, driving it to secluded spaces, and when they finally managed to follow him to it, it was missing the front seat.

Police search the CRX and find that the front passenger seat has recently been removed. The floor is soaked, as if it had been washed. There are heavy-duty garbage bags, cloth towels, masking tape, and two books: Masterpieces of Murder and Homicide. Police also find another drop of blood and match it to Nina.

The onus is on Reiser to come up with evidence - where is the chair? explain the blood, why was the car washed?

I believe in fact the police will have to prove beyond reasonable doubt (a) that Nina was even murdered, (b) that Hans Reiser murdered her. He doesn't have to prove his innocence. There will have to be a convincing story that explains all the weird circumstances somehow.

I have no doubt that Reiser is a genius,

Yes, so if he's such a genius, why would he be so stupid as to remove a seat of his car, w

I'm not arguing against innocent until proven guilty, thats just as important in the UK as it is in the US.

what I *am* saying is that there are a number of huge unknowns here and some damn compelling circumstantial evidence. Amongst others...
1. the missing car seat
2. the freshly washed car
3. the fact of the passport and wads of cash he had on him
4. the book on murder
5. the missing wife
6. the motive
7. thoroughly strange behavior (driving around, leaving the car)

..therefore the onus is on him to provide an explanation or some form of defense. if he does not then can you see any Jury acquitting him? I'm not saying that the police should have the power to presume guilt - of course not - I'm saying that in this case him staying silent is really not a sensible course of action.

I wouldn't think so. There are Bad and Good Apples everywhere. Show me any large group of people that doesn't have a member who has committed murder. Using this a FUD for an unrelated crime is first in extreamly bad taist, and could back fire badly. These are unrelated crimes. Real crimnals who are in jail are not like cartoon vilans who break laws for the sake of breaking laws, they break laws because in their mind they don't have any other options (For example running a red light because you see someon

Right, sort of like the monkey boy [microsoft.com], who gets hypered easily in public conferences and meetings. Oh, and let's not forget him vowed to kill one another, and threw a chair across the room.

Well, if Steve Ballmer's children and wife gone missing one day, I bet the public may not apply the same prejudice to his case.

Well, I'm much more disturbed by Reiser playing graphically violent video games with his young son - to the point where the kids has nightmares - in order to "teach the culture of manhood", than by the fact he has a friend into BDSM and cutting. (Of course, Sturgeon's claim later on that he killed a bunch of people is more disturbing than either, and certainly throws dobut into the case against Reiser.)